Kant Today: A Survey

by Erich Przywara

Overview

In Kant Today: A Survey, Erich Przywara explores the enduring impact of the tensions inherent in Immanuel Kant’s thought on continental philosophy over nearly a century and a half. Drawing parallels to the efforts at synthesis of Thomas Aquinas, Przywara presents Kant as a thinker striving to reconcile disparate currents of contemporary thought. While Aquinas fused neo-Platonic Augustinian philosophy with the neo-Aristotelianism of the Parisian Arts Faculty, Kant sought to harmonize continental idealism with the skepticism and empiricism exemplified by a British thinker like David Hume.
 
Aquinas’s synthesis maintained coherence due to his reliance on the analogia entis. In contrast, Kant’s synthesis lacked such a unifying principle, leading to the proliferation of philosophical antitheses reverberating throughout nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe. Kant Today chronicles the aftermath of Kant’s tumultuous synthesis and suggests that the resolution may lie in a thinker capable of uniting Augustine’s fervent pursuit of God with Aquinas’s distinctive epistemological equilibrium—namely, John Henry Newman.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781685781392
Publisher:	Word on Fire
Publication date:	04/28/2025
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

The German Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara (1889–1972), renowned as a key figure in Catholic theology during the first half of the twentieth century, is perhaps best known today for his engagements with Karl Barth on the analogy of being. He served as a mentor to both Edith Stein and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The author of a vast body of work encompassing hundreds of publications, Przywara’s seminal text Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm is available in English translation.
 

Table of Contents

Contents
Translator's Acknowledgments
Introduction
Preface
I. Historical Perspectives
2. Kant and Thomas
3. From Kant to Thomas
A Prospect: John Henry Newman
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Erich Przywara was one of the great Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. Until recently, however, little of his work had been translated into English—and not without reason: his philosophical works are demanding and difficult to translate. But with the translation of his Analogia Entis and now David Augustine’s excellent translation of Kant Today, Przywara’s contribution to Catholic philosophy and theology is finally beginning to receive the attention it deserves. As this work exemplifies, Przywara was more engaged with the philosophical currents of the time than any other Catholic of his generation, writing successive monographs on Scheler, Kierkegaard, and here Kant. Following his typical method, in Kant Today, Przywara puts Thomas Aquinas and Newman into conversation with Kant—not so much in order to show how contemporary Kant is, but in order to show how contemporary—and in some ways unsurpassed—Thomas and the larger Catholic tradition remains.”
 

John R. Betz

Erich Przywara, whom Hans Urs von Balthasar used to address simply as Meister, continues to be regarded as one of the most catholic (in every sense of the word) minds of twentieth-century German Catholicism. David Augustine’s lucid translation of Przywara’s slim classic Kant Today finally enables an English-language readership to understand how the Jesuit philosopher and theologian critically engaged both Kant's transcendental subjectivity and the Transcendental Thomism that, for better or for worse, continues to shape Catholic theology today. It constitutes an intellectual event of the first order.

Aaron Pidel

The fascination of Catholic theologians with Kant in the early twentieth century was immense. Today, even if few Catholic theologians under the age of 55 have read Kant’s major writings, his impact remains immense due to Karl Rahner. In the late 1920s, the young Rahner had read his way through Kant and Maréchal and was turning his eye toward Heidegger. Surely not coincidentally, at just that time the great Erich Przywara postponed his larger projects to provide this vastly erudite critique of Kant, Maréchal, and Heidegger—urging Newman and Aquinas as the joint path forward. If only Rahner had listened, as we should today.

Matthew Levering